Mental Environment

We live in both a mental and physical environment. The mental environment contains forces that affect our thinking and emotions and that can dominate us until we become strong with Knowledge.

Directives

"In order to have a positive effect on the mental environment, you must become aware of the mental environment around you, learn how to establish your own mental environment and learn how to influence it and maintain it. Her you learn about your effect on others and their effect upon you. You learn this through many, many experiences and through objective observation."

• Wisdom from the Greater Community II, chapter 25: Environments

Short quotes

"Knowledge ... is the only part of you that is unaffected by the Mental Environment."

• The Allies of Humanity II, The First Commentary: The Problem of Human Denial

"Mental environments are made up of forces and stimulants. Each force has an effect upon you and you, in turn, have an effect upon it."

• Wisdom from the Greater Community II, chapter 25: Environments

Long Quotes

"[T]he mental environment is something very new to human understanding. The mental and physical environments are not the same. They operate on different levels of existence and follow different laws. They overlap tremendously, but you cannot take the principles of one and apply them to the other."

"Unlike the physical environment, you cannot spoil the mental environment. It is an environment that is made up of thoughts and groups of thoughts, which are called forces. The mental environment cannot be destroyed, but it can become very polluted. It can become very destructive. Unlike the physical environment, the mental environment knows no boundaries in terms of time and space. For instance, if you have great emotional distress where you are, it affects someone on the other side of the world, and vice versa.... Minds are connected through a very subtle internal network."

"The mental environment is what you create for yourself.... something you have to be responsible for because unless a foreign intelligence is in your midst, almost everything that you experience in the mental environment will come from other human beings. Plants and animals do not have a strong influence on the mental environment. In nature, as you may have noticed, there can be neutrality in the mental environment. That is why people seek refuge in nature--it is refreshingly open and free of dominating influences."

• Wisdom from the Greater Community II, chapter 25: Environments

"In the mental environment, you have to learn how to shield your mind. Others who have skill here are able to do this – to block intrusions, to block potent forces, to block thought forms that are projected at one and to maintain one’s awareness if one is being affected by technology, by forms of radiation, by scanning and things of this nature."

• Life in the Universe chapter 10, the Power of Knowledge

"The Mental Environment is the arena of influence. People know very little about it, but it is very important in Greater Community interactions, particularly between races or organizations that compete with each other. They have to spend a great deal of time trying to discern what the other is going to do and trying to influence the other in subtle ways. This does not happen through technology as much as it happens through consciousness, through awareness, through the projection of thought and through cunning activities."

• The Allies of Humanity II, The First Commentary: The Problem of Human Denial

Examples

"[A] university ... is a concentrated learning environment.... A library at a university has a very different feeling than a library in a city community. It is a concentrated and focused learning environment. It may be easier to study in the university than it is in a public place."

"If you go to a place where everyone is focused on a sports event, it can be much easier to enjoy it and participate in it than it would be watching it on the television. This represents a mental environment. People are together thinking about something in common. This creates a potency or a force in that environment, a force that will affect you greatly."

"... as in advertising, the basic understanding that people can be made to do what you want them to do if you give them certain kinds of stimulation and certain kinds of ideas."

"If you were to go up and down your street and enter everyone's home, you would enter a different mental environment in every place and would have a different experience. Some places you would feel comfortable, some places you would feel uncomfortable. Some places it would be very easy for you to think clearly; other places it would be more difficult."

• Wisdom from the Greater Community II, chapter 25: Environments

Further study

• The Allies of Humanity II, Third Briefing: The Influence upon Humanity